Leo Strauss's Letters to the Arabist Paul Kraus, between the Search of the Hidden Truth and Exile in Mizraim

The German born American scholar Leo Strauss has become a lasting influence on US foreign policy as well as the ideological discourse of the Chinese Communist Party. But at his times he was in quest of classic political philosophy, by which he sought to overcome the moral relativity of modern society. One stepping stone to this ideal was medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophy. Letters written by him in the mid 1930s to Paul Kraus, a professor of semitic languages at Cairo University, give insight not only into their common search for underlying meanings in ancient manuscripts, but also his quest of the political refugee for exile in Egypt. While ultimately he would not migrate to Mizraim, his brother-in-law Kraus would stay on in Cairo, where the letters are kept till today in a private archive. The question of how the correspondence has ended up at the present location, is a journey to the lasting fascination of the West with ancient Egypt as well as a region that was already in the 1930s heading towards an ongoing internal and external strife.

The object of this lecture series is to bring together scholars and librarians engaged with collections of correspondences and/or include related projects that use appropriate digital tools to map and analyze such corpora. It is hosted by Sabine Schmidtke (NES@IAS) and María Mercedes Tuya (Digital Scholarship @IAS). For additional information on this event and the lecture series visit: https://albert.ias.edu/20.500.12111/8044.